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A shopping cart is a piece of software that acts
as an online store's catalog and ordering process.
Typically, a shopping cart is the interface between
a company's Web site and its deeper infrastructure,
allowing consumers to select merchandise; review
what they have selected; make necessary modifications
or additions; and purchase the merchandise.
These applications typically provide a means
of capturing a client's payment information,
but in the case of a credit card they rely on
the software module of the secure gateway provider,
in conjunction with the secure payment gateway,
in order to conduct secure credit card transactions
online. Some setup must be done in the HTML
code of the website, and the shopping cart software
must be installed on the server which hosts
the site, or on the secure server which accepts
sensitive ordering information.
E-shopping carts are usually implemented using
HTTP cookies or query strings. In most server
based implementations however, data related
to the shopping cart is kept in the Session
object and is accessed and manipulated on the
fly, as the user selects different items from
the cart.
Later at the process of commit, the information
is accessed and an order is generated against
the selected item thus clearing the shopping
cart. Although the most simple shopping carts
strictly allow for an item to be added to a
basket to start a checkout process (e.g. the
free PayPal shopping cart), most shopping cart
software actually provides additional features
that an Internet merchant uses to fully manage
an online store. Data (products, categories,
discounts, orders, customers, etc.) is normally
stored in a database and accessed in real time
by the software.
We can help you to install and customize such
softwares so you can go about running your online
business seemlessly from accpeting orders to
delivering it to the customer's door.
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